Caine prize reveals 'uniquely powerful' shortlist

'Uniquely powerful' stories from South Africa, Zambia, Sierra Leone and Kenya have made the shortlist for this year's Caine prize for African writing.

Dubbed the African Booker and with patrons including Nobel laureates Nadine Gordimer, Wole Soyinka and JM Coetzee, the £10,000 prize is given to a short story by an African writer published in English, with 115 entries from 13 African countries received this year.

Two South African writers made the shortlist: the Cape Town novelist and playwright Alex Smith with Soulmates, a fictionalised account of the first recorded mixed race love affair in Africa, in which a white woman finds love with an African slave. Fellow South African Ken Barris, a lecturer as well as a poet and novelist, is shortlisted for The Life of Worm, the story of a very anxious man with an almost uncontrollable dog. Barris has said that the story is an "ever so slightly" exaggerated version of his own experiences as the anxious owner of a difficult dog.

Kenyan Lily Mabura's How Shall We Kill the Bishop?, about religious hierarchy in a north Kenyan town, and Sierra Leonean writer Olufemi Terry's Stickfighting Days, in which adolescent boys fight and sniff glue in a city rubbish dump, were also selected by judges.

The shortlist is completed with Muzungu by Zambian Namwali Serpell, which explores the connections between a white family and their black servants. Serpell was born in Lusaka and moved to the US when she was nine. "It's an incredibly rich story about a very well-explored subject," said chair of judges Fiammetta Rocco, the Economist's literary editor.

Joining Fiammetta on the judging panel this year are Granta deputy editor Ellah Allfrey, Professor Jon Cook of the University of East Anglia, and Georgetown University's Professor Samantha Pinto.

Rocco said that each of the five stories on the shortlist "really has an edge". "Some are quite familiar stories - the white boss and the black servants, security, violence – but each one has an extra dimension that helped it stand out from the crowd and made it quite difficult to forget," she said, adding that "Africa has much to be proud of in these five writers". She added that: "Not only are their stories all confident, ambitious and skilfully written, each one boasts an added dimension – a voice, character or particular emotional connection – that makes it uniquely powerful."

The winner of the £10,000 prize will be announced on 5 July, and given the chance to take up a month's residence at Georgetown University, Washington DC, as a writer-in-residence. Previous winners include Nigerian writer EC Osondu, Uganda's Monica Arac de Nyeko and Brian Chikwava, from Zimbabwe, whose first novel Harare North has just been published by Jonathan Cape.

The shortlist:

Ken Barris (South Africa) The Life of Worm, from New Writing from Africa 2009